The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity by Marion Thain (review)

Over the past fifteen years, the study of lyric has acquired unprecedented momentum, partly as a consequence of fresh critical attentiveness to related fields such as historical poetics, genre studies, and the operations of aesthetic form. As contributing editor of the recent critical anthology The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations (2013), Marion Thain has already demonstrated an expert's knowledge of lyric's century-spanning evolution. With this new book—The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity—she unfolds the unexpectedly vigorous contribution to the story of lyric offered by British poetry in the late nineteenth century. Imaginative and wide-ranging in conception, energetic in its inquiry, and fresh in its diverse insights, The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism considerably advances earlier inquiries initiated by scholars such as Joseph Bristow (The Fin de Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s [2005]) and Ana Parejo Vadillo (Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity [2005]). Broadly, it eschews the long-held view that the aestheticist lyric sought to escape the chaos of modernity through nostalgic conventionalism, and argues instead for lyric's varied and richly reflective responses to the rapid change and alienation common to modern experience.

Among the book's most inventive features is its organization around three philosophically driven "conceptual axes": Time, Space, and Subjectivity (8). Matters of historical and cultural context are then treated within the six chapters, or "case studies" as Thain calls them, that illustrate each conceptual axis (8). This arrangement allows the reader to experience lyrical responses to modernity as interdisciplinary knowledge, gradually accruing and re-echoing as the case studies unfold. For instance, in "Part I: Time," Thain uses G. W. F. Hegel and Walter Benjamin—both poetic theorists, especially of lyric, whose work chronologically bookends the nineteenth century—as a backdrop for two case studies that follow. The first of these case studies (chapter 3: "Painting, Music, Touch"), for example, considers competing temporalities in two of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's ekphrastic lyrics. "For a Venetian Pastoral by Giorgione" (1849/1870) interrogates the Hegelian dichotomy between temporality and suspended time (eternity), while "For an Allegorical Dance of Women, by Andrea Mantegna" (1849/1870) explores temporalities more commonly associated with Benjamin, in which the past is touched by the present. In Thain's words, "this sonnet seeks not an eternal moment out of body and out of time, but an inhabitation of history through a shared physical sensation" (80). Given Thain's particular concern with revisions made to these poems between 1850 and 1870, the reader also experiences them as unexpected manifestations of Rossetti's own diachronically evolving understanding of time.

Rossetti returns to the discussion in chapter 9, "A. C. Swinburne in the Round," and although subjectivity is the structuring axis here, issues of temporality also return in seminal discussions of death, living death, and immortality. The structural arrangement of Thain's project thus lends it a philosophical richness, answering well to her aim to treat the aestheticist lyric as a knowing and highly sophisticated reflection on and confrontation with modernity. This structure also allows her the freedom to explore unexpected combinations of poets. Chapter 7, for instance, the last chapter in "Part II: Space," unexpectedly pairs Alice Meynell and Thomas Hardy, brought together "both to motivate a new way of reading the canonical writer, and to integrate the voice of a more recently recovered writer into the poetic lineage to which she rightfully belongs" (153).

Thain frames "Space" with the theories of John Stuart Mill and Maurice MerleauPonty, identifying in the process two pressing lyric problems: one, memorably explored by Mill, entails the potential in lyric to forego its own I/you transactional nature and capitulate to solipsism, while the other, informed by Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, involves lyric's tendency to appeal to the eye via print on the page, thus abandoning its capacity to appeal to the ear. Thain addresses these problems through touch or "an extended...